Alan Feldman

The year I was born the atomic bomb went off. Here I'd just begun, and someone found the switch to turn off the world. In the furnace-light, in the central solar fire of that heat lamp, the future got very finite, and it was possible to imagine time-travelers failing to arrive, because there was no future. Inside the great dark clock in the hall, heavy brass cylinders descended. Tick-tock, the chimes changed their tune one phrase at a time. The bomb became a film star, its glamorous globe of smoke searing the faces of men in beach chairs. Someone threw up every day at school. No time to worry about collective death, when life itself was permeated by ordeals. And so we grew up, beneath an umbrella of acceptance. In bio we learned there were particles cruising through us like whales through archipelagoes, and in civics that if Hitler had gotten the bomb he'd have used it on the inferior races, and all this time love was etching its scars on our skins like maps. The heavens remained pure, except for little white slits on the perfect blue skin that planes cut in the icy upper air, like needles sewing. From one, a tiny seed might fall that would make a sun on earth. And so the century passed, with me still in it, books waiting on the shelves to become cinders, what we felt locked up inside, waiting to be read, down the long corridor of time. I was born the year the bomb exploded. Twice whole cities were charred like cities in the Bible, but we didn't look back. We went on thinking we could go on, our shapes the same, darkened now against a background lit by fire. Forgive me for doubting you're there, Citizens, on your holodecks with earth wallpaper— a shadow-toned ancestor with poorly pressed pants, protected like a child from knowing the future.

The sail is so vast when it's laid out on the driveway. I stake it with a screwdriver through the shackle at the tack to stretch it smooth, pulling on the head and clew. Now it's smooth as a night's worth of new snow. My wife, my partner, has been torn from her busy day. We face each other across the sail's foot and with my right hand and her left hand (I'm right handed, she's left handed) we pull an arm's length of the sail down over itself, then do this again, keeping my left hand, and her right hand, towards the foot. Each fold is easier since the sail grows narrower near the top. Then we fold towards each other and I wrap my arms around it, while she holds the bag's mouth open, the gray bag that will cover it through the winter. Then I thank her. And the driveway is visible again as it is in spring, when all the snow has melted.

I wake to the sound of water, and think, "Mother has died and gone to France," She is at un autre hôtel , speaking French better than ever, while I stare at the fog that has a river in it—the broad Dordogne, making its river noise, as if all the faucets have been left on all night. The river rushing in one direction only, so different from Blackfish Creek, where the sea floods in and back, scrubbing the sand both ways. Well, one travels so things are different. American actors speak French on TV here. Last night they showed Accident Catastrophe about two babies switched in the hospital at birth. One dies. The parents discover the dead child was someone else's and their child is alive in Florida with son père , though sa mère est morte de some disease, who knows? Anyway, Ed Asner, who plays the lawyer, speaks gravelly French, but people have an American demeanor, they pull their hair on the edge of violence. Then each family gives up a piece, and the child ends up more loved than ever, as if it's inevitable. Or so the river is telling me with its one-way simplicity, like gravity. "Alive in the eternal heart of France"—that's Mother I'm thinking about, for some reason, maybe the journal my wife's been keeping, so like the daily letters Mother wrote to sa mère et son père , when her life was flowing through her like the broad Dordogne. And where is she now? Does she wish my father were with her, one of him alive, and one with her? A bell is ringing wildly, each of its peals like a round boat rolling downstream where the river divides around an island only to sweep back into itself somewhere in the fog.